CULTURAL LIFE

BOOKS
I’ve just finished AUSTERITY BRITAIN 1945-1951 by David Kynaston: I bought it out of curiosity because it covers the most vivid period of my youth (I was twelve at the time of the General Election of May 1945: my father then Frank Pakenham, later Longford, worked on the Beveridge Report, was defeated in the election but as a peer became a member of the Labour government). Kynaston’s balanced, often very poignant picture, brought back many memories and corrected others for me.

OPERA
Harold introduced me to the music of Benjamin Britten (I was put off early by GLORIANA although since Phyllida Law’s production I have come to love it). PETER GRIMES is his favourite and BILLY BUDD (either Thomas Allen or Simon Keenlyside aloft) is mine. But we both got together to see DEATH IN VENICE because Ian Bostridge was singing in it, and we had admired his Peter Quint intensely. It was a magic evening and I particularly liked the way the casting of Benjamin Paul Griffiths as Tadzio, an athletic teenager, removed any feeling of paedophilia from the narrative. Deborah Warner’s production centred as it should on the worship of beauty. I’m looking forward to seeing the FIDELIO at Covent Garden. Karita Mattila is another of my favourite singers and I haven’t seen her live since her Elisabetta in DON CARLOS.

ART
Antony Gormley’s exhibition BLIND LIGHT at the Hayward has left a very strong, very disquieting impression which I am sure was the artist’s intention. I particularly liked the room containing ‘Matrices and Expansions’ made of stainless steel. Vanity prevented me entering the eponymous steamy room of the exhibition, since I noticed everyone emerging from it dripping wet and I was about to go on television; so I slouched round the outside like a private eye.

THEATRE
Edmund White’s TERRE HAUTE about Gore Vidal and the bomber Timothy McVeigh (given different names) sprang to life with Peter Eyre’s brilliant, moving depiction of the Vidal figure. He was ably partnered by Arthur Darvill as the bomber in what was, astonishingly, his first role on stage. And I cannot resist mentioning the current mesmerising production of BETRAYAL at the Donmar Warehouse. Harold and I were already living together at the time when he wrote it, so I saw the creative process at first hand including the roads which were not taken. Would a play called A VISIT TO TORCELLO (an early title) have been quite so successful?